A water storage system is currently under construction in the meadow at my cabin property. The work is being performed by known experts: beavers.
I have a bit over 600 feet of
meandering creek and thickets in my meadow.
Last Year, beavers produced a few ponds and still-water runs on the
lower half of my property. They advanced
upstream this year.
I am happy to have fishing
ponds and lots of water. Not long ago, I
read an article about how the reintroduction of beaver into a valley suffering
from poor grass production for cattle, saw dramatic improvement in grass and
forage as the groundwater levels spread from the water held back by the
beavers. They also reduced damage to the
landscape from torrential runoffs.
Beavers have a place in the
scheme of things.
Beavers are interesting, too. They are the largest rodents in North
America. They mostly operate at night
and are capable of remaining underwater for up to fifteen minutes.
A beaver's teeth never stop
growing. If you somehow provided all the
food a beaver needed for survival but disallowed it from chewing on wood (a practice
that wears down its teeth), the beaver's teeth would rapidly grow and deform to
a point where they could potentially curve in and puncture the creature’s
skull. At the very least, the teeth
would soon become useless and, if left to itself, the beaver would starve to
death. In a sense, a beaver is for its
entire life stalked by its own teeth.
— Mitchell Hegman
No comments:
Post a Comment